The Long Game by Laura J. Oliver

Laura Oliver will be reading her work at the Stoltz Listening Room at the Avalon Foundation in Easton on April 24th at 6 pm as part of our Spy Nights series. Tickets can be purchased here.

The year is passing, and I’ve still got this giant chunk of foam core with photos, affirmations, and mantras all over it lying on the gray rug in my office where the sun streams in through windows with slightly wavy, 19th-century glass. My vision board is a visual roadmap for my life, and instead of updating it, I keep tripping over it. For some reason, I want privacy to visualize my dreams, as if my vision for happiness is a secret I’m keeping. 

Well, maybe not so much now… 

The word currently at the center is “God,” which I may swap out for “Love.” Is there a difference? I have studied the nature of consciousness, energy, and quantum physics for years, looking for the places where science and spirit are one miraculous thing—the way light is both a wave and a particle. The brain is an expectation machine, and I draw into my experience what I place my attention on. 

I have cut words from magazines such as “All” and Good” and arranged them so the board reads “God is All,” “God is Good,” “All is Good, and “Love is All,” depending on whether you are reading left to right, up and down, or diagonally.   

I have a section for my kids and their families and a place where I thank the universe for the health I’d like to possess as if I already have it. “Thank you for sound sleep!” 

A place for wealth. 

Right next to my vision board is what I call a surrender box–a small wooden music box I bought in Switzerland when I was 17. Carved flowers adorn the lid, and it plays Edelweiss when opened. A slip of paper is tucked inside, on which I have written a vision for my life, which I’ve removed from the board. You can’t make anything happen—you can only invite, allow, and sometimes choose to let go.

When Mr. Oliver and I were in college, we’d sit in the window of Timmy’s Carry Out, indulging in cheesesteak subs, dreaming of our unlived lives. I’ll be a writer, I told the future, and you’ll be a naval architect. We’ll live in our favorite neighborhood on the west side of town–gracious houses on the river, century-old trees, abandoned railroad tracks in a deep ravine with a little wooden bridge across them.

After our third child was born, we started driving through our ideal neighborhood on reconnaissance. One day, a “for sale” sign appeared in front of a modest, gray cedar-shingled house with a red front door set back from the road. Small, not on the water, it was still out of our price range, but we drove by for months, noting with increasing interest that the sign remained up. Finally, we called. It had been renovated by a developer interested in flipping it. The price remained more money than we had, but the bank was pressuring the owner. We asked to see it.

 “I love this house!” I whispered to Mr. Oliver. The owner had invested in charming upgrades that didn’t translate into making the house worth more, which was why he was having trouble recovering his investment— a central vacuum system, a second fireplace, and skylights. The master bedroom featured floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the back garden, and the architect had created three distinct peaks to the roofline. Neighbors called it “the three bears house” because of the peaks. And we had three bears.

 So, we met with the owner to make a totally respectable offer just under the asking price. We explained how grateful we were that he had met with us, the specifics of the financing, and why we felt the offer was fair. 

The seller was a generation older with steely blue eyes, and when we finished explaining our offer, he rose from the table in his khakis and Topsiders and walked toward the door. 

“You two don’t have the money to buy this house,” he said. A bit ashamed somehow, (it was the words “you two”), and with nothing to lose, I stood up, as well. “Mr. Edwards,” I said, “the reality is that, like everything else in this world, this house is worth exactly what someone will pay for it. We’re the only buyers who have ever made an offer. Ever. Which seems to make this offer what the house is worth, or at least an offer worth considering.” He closed the door. I shrugged on my jacket with my baby’s my-pretty-pony barrette in the pocket, and we left.

So, we surrendered the dream and took our disappointment home with us to the house we had built by the Bay Bridge. The house where three little children had a treehouse in the woods and a swing on an ancient oak. Where we already had two fireplaces of our own design, a family to love, and parents nearby and I said to myself, “I can be happy here or there. I’m grateful for what is.” I knew even then that you don’t know good news from bad. What happens to you is just news. Life is a long game. And this is one of the ways in which I learned that.

I didn’t forget the house; I just held it in open palms. I essentially put the dream in a surrender box. Just as yesterday, I said, please take my desire for this thing I can’t have. Be in my disappointment and be in my peace. Desire and peace exist side by side when you replace longing with trust—when you accept that you don’t know good news from bad. The universe has no need for you to understand it.

Mr. Oliver, unbeknownst to me, continued to drive by the house on his way to work—holding the surrendered dream like a place set at the table in case good fortune was happening by. Occasionally, he’d walk in the door with a bouquet of tulips in his hand while I was making dinner and say in passing, “House hasn’t sold yet.” 

One day there was a call from Mr. Edwards’ agent. “You expressed an interest in the  house,” she said. “If you are still looking, Mr. Edwards is interested in selling it to you.” 

“We’re interested,” we said, “for $40,000 less than our original offer.” 

Our bears were one, five, and eight when we moved in, and we loved that house with all our hearts for 15 years. 

I am a fan of God. Yay, God. And I am a fan of science. Yay, science. And I am always looking at the place they intersect in awe and wonder. It’s like the definition of a simile. Two unlike things are contrasted to perfectly illuminate a third thing, which is an indescribable, unknowable truth we can, at best, only intuit. A place of gratitude and surrender. 

Where God is Love, Love is All, and All is Good. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.